


Intake

by linman



Category: Rivers of London - Ben Aaronovitch
Genre: F/M, Gen, Spec, jossbait
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-25
Updated: 2015-02-25
Packaged: 2018-03-15 06:00:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,406
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3436109
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/linman/pseuds/linman
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"So where are you taking me?" Lesley asked.</p>
<p>"Home," Peter said.</p>
<p>Post-endgame spec.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Intake

**Author's Note:**

> The incomplete-canon fan's dilemma: do I write down extravagantly self-indulgent plot-bunnies, or do I sit on my hands and avoid getting decisively jossed? Guess which won.
> 
> Thanks to kivrin and hedda62 for the beta pass.

“Why is it,” Peter said, ripping open a package of moist wipes, “that whenever there’s a stream of sewage on the scene,  _I’m_ the one who winds up coated in it? Why is it never you?”

“Just lucky I guess,” Lesley said. She could have said that instead of sewage she was the one who got covered in blood, and instead of almost getting drowned she was the one who almost got strangled, and anyway the long walk back to where Peter had stashed his car had nearly dried them both off. But he was inviting her to be smug, so she was obligingly smug.

“This will teach me to wear my good shoes to an apocalypse.” He started attacking the mess with fretful swipes.

She watched him for a moment and then said, “Peter. I think you may as well call it a dead loss.”

“What?” He looked up sharply. She probably shouldn’t have used the word  _dead_ . Or  _loss_ .

“Your good pair of shoes,” she said gently.

“Oh.” He considered his progress getting the sewage off his Docs, and said, “I think you’re right.” He abandoned the wipes, dug out his spare boots, and sat down on the bumper to change.

It was her turn to be calm and assured; they’d been trading back and forth for hours. Sometimes very abruptly. “It’s going to be okay, you know,” she said.

He cocked her a look full of sarcastic comment, the kind of look she supposed Londoners practiced in their cradle, ready to pull out for terrorist bombings, catastrophic floods, and delays on the tube. Or in this case, all three.

Instead of getting up right away, Peter braced his hands on his knees and blew out his cheeks, his gaze going inward. “What?” she said.

“I’m working out what to do next,” he said.

“Arrest me?” she suggested. “You haven’t done that yet.”

He smiled up at her. “Okay,” he said. “You’re under arrest.”

He was baiting her, and she tried to resist, but had to give up and roll her eyes. “That was pathetic,” she said. “Would you even remember the caution if I weren’t there to prompt you? And I bet you haven’t even got any cuffs.”

“Of course I do,” he said. “Somewhere.” Between his absent glance at the car and looking back at her, he seemed to come to a decision. He got up and gestured for her to hand over the sausage bag she carried cross-shoulder; she unslung it and gave it to him, and he tossed it rattling in the back seat. Then he opened the passenger door for her. “Get in,” he said. “I’ll let you caution yourself,” and continued once he was in the driver’s seat, “And I’ve already statemented you and everything, so I think we’re good.”

If that was what you could call the very unpleasant ten minutes of breath-torqued confession sprinkled liberally with both their tears, then okay, she’d been statemented. Lesley punched his arm by way of agreement.

Peter started the car and backed carefully toward the road, the movements of his hands unhurried and deliberate.

“So where are you taking me then?” she asked.

“Home,” he said.

*

They were almost out of London before she figured out what he meant. Peter kept having to detour around spurs of chaos that blocked traffic, and finally figured out how to make a turn as soon as they got within earshot of a chorus of honking, and they were so turned around for a while that once they had a clear run, she was a while realizing that he wasn’t triangulating back to Russell Square, or the nick, or even his parents’ house. He was aiming for Brightlingsea.

She slammed down her feet as if she could brake from the passenger seat. “ _Peter_ —”

It was Peter’s turn to be calm. “They’ll catch up with us soon enough,” he said without taking his gaze from the road.

“That’s not what I meant,” she snapped. “But now you mention it, do they even know we’re not dead?”

“I’m pretty sure,” he said. “I distinctly remember mugging for a Sky News camera at some point in the proceedings.”

“That’s not funny.”

“I’m not laughing.” Then he added, with a faint smirk: “It’s a good thing I’m pretty.”

She glared at him. “Have you even called in? You haven’t, have you?”

“Can’t,” Peter said. “ _Somebody_ fried my Airwave.”

“That was not my fault,” she hissed back. “You’re the one who fucking left it on.”

“Yeah,” he said, “so I could hear.”

_Everything but the ambush_ , was going to be her retort, but her stamina suddenly evaporated, and she broke down.  She tried not to make any noise, but there was nowhere to hide.

Peter didn’t make any remark, but after a minute he took one hand briefly from the wheel to find hers and give it a squeeze. She sniffed hard and recovered.

They picked up speed once they got clear of the city. Peter wasn’t driving particularly fast, but she felt as though she were sitting at the nose of a rocket, borne forward relentlessly and wishing she could be left behind in the figurative clouds of condensation in their wake.

After a while she said, “You really should call,” and when he didn’t answer, “You’ll be in so much trouble.”

“I don’t think so,” Peter said, very quietly. “The Met  _owes_ me at this point.”

For leaving him and Nightingale to twist in the wind, he didn’t have to say. Lesley looked out her window. “Do you think he’ll make it?” she said.

“I don’t know,” Peter said.

There was bleakness, but not the least hint of blame toward her in his voice; it would be easier if there were. Her strategic reasoning had been completely vindicated—her moral reasoning, not so much, and since she hadn’t been expecting to survive the endgame she hadn’t really made a specific plan for addressing it. And  _facing the consequences_ was turning out to be even less specific a plan than she’d thought, since people kept assigning the consequences, not to a misshapen monster or a rejected outlaw, but to—Lesley May.

She sat silent through the familiar turns; finally they pulled in to park across from the house she never thought she’d see again. The house, and the whole street, was dark and still.

It was hard for her to breathe. “This is going to suck,” she said, as Peter reached for his door.

He looked back at her. “ _This_ is going to suck?” he said, his glance taking in its sweep the sucking of the immediate past and the sucking yet to come. And he had a point, but he also wasn’t pretending not to know what she meant. “Come on.”

“What time is it?”

Peter read his watch by the dome light. “It’s nobody-should-be-awake-o’clock.”

She sighed.

“Does your father have a shotgun?”

“No,” Lesley snorted. “For fuck’s sake, Peter. Let’s just do it then.”

At the sound of their car doors slamming shut in the quiet, she expected some response along the street—the dog two doors down, or a light going on—but there was nothing. When they reached the doorstep Peter rang the bell sharply, in proper police fashion. She controlled a shudder and tried to breathe slowly.

Just as Peter was reaching for the bell again, there was the sound of heavy familiar footsteps. Light came up behind the door-glass, and her father’s shadow loomed in it briefly before he opened the door.

He looked smaller, haggard, older. His eyes went straight to Peter’s face, as if ready to read the bad news off it like newsprint—and then a second later registered who it was standing next to him.

_Dad_ , she tried to say, but her throat was stuck. He made a little noise that seemed to crack her clear across, and then in the next instant he had caught her up and half-crushed her in a frantic hug, and they were both sobbing, and there was urgent shouting and the rest of her family was boiling out to join the scrum, and somebody finally thought to urge the crying knot of Mays off the doorstep and back into the house, and Lesley just managed to get a flailing arm free to drag Peter in after by a fistful of his shirt.

After that there was much scraping of kitchen chairs and making of tea and Lesley was buffeted with hugs and smacks and questions nobody waited for an answer to, and everybody talked at once, and at least twice she had to fight off an attempt to wrap her in a blanket or a cardigan.

“I’m not cold,” she insisted, though she was still shaking visibly. “But I do want a wash. Hold my tea.” She checked Peter with a glance, to see if he was okay with her disappearing however briefly from his sight. As far as she knew he hadn’t said a word the whole time; he was just sitting there with a mug of tea on his knee, watching them all with a funny little mother-cat smile on his face.

He didn’t object, but he didn’t look sorry when half her siblings insisted on trooping upstairs with her, either.

As she skinned into a fresh shirt and trousers, and stuffed her feet into a pair of deck shoes no one would miss when she was parted from them at prisoner intake, her sisters subjected her to a continued interrogation, which she was able to deflect neatly by concentrating on the necessities of clothing and hot water. Most of the questions fell under three simple headings—there was  _Where have you been?_ to which there were a variety of honest answers including a)  _hell_ , b)  _London, mostly_ and c)  _you don’t want to know_ . There was  _Why didn’t you call?_ to which the very unpalatable answer was  _To keep you safe_ . And there were all the questions that went under the heading of  _What the fuck happened?_ which she  _definitely_ was not going to answer, since she had already cautioned herself.

One question, however, she did give an answer to.

“Are you under arrest?”

She came up from splashing hot water on her face and took the towel that was handed to her.  “Yes,” she said, imbibing the soft warm scent of her own family’s laundry room. Her reflection was revealed in the mirror by degrees as she lowered the towel—one of the salmon-pink ones—and she met her own eyes with equanimity. In the end her face was still a ruin, and it was time to make up her mind that that was how it was going to be. No masks, no glamors, no miracles. No divisions in her outer world, and no schisms inside. There was no monster here, just Lesley May, who was going to be okay; who had fucked up.

“Your boyfriend arrested you?”

Lesley ignored the snigger. “He’s not my—” and gave up with a sigh. She knew exactly what construction they’d put on her reunion with Peter if she dared to describe it in any way. It’s Complicated didn’t even begin to cover it. And it was only going to get more so.

When she got downstairs she was given a fresh cup of tea and her chair back and listened to the end of Peter’s neat precis of the last twenty-four hours, glibly innocent of most of the magical content, she noticed—it had become ingrained habit at this point.

When he finished, there was a brief silence as he cut his thirst with a long sip of tea. Her father glanced at her and back to Peter, and took a fortifying breath. “So what happens now?” He hadn’t missed a thing, Lesley realized, including her earlier glance at Peter for permission to go upstairs.

Peter lowered his tea and considered him silently for a moment. Then he dug his spare phone out of his jacket pocket and turned it on.

They watched him as he waited for an answer to his call. “It’s Grant, sir,” he said. Then, “Brightlingsea?” with a quizzical glance at Lesley. She shrugged. Sometimes Peter was too used to people not following his process. And sometimes he wasn’t used to it enough.

Peter listened for another minute and then said, “Actually,  _need_ is not the operative word here, sir. Based on my assessment.” Then: “Two senior officers if you can spare them, and a driver. At most.”

Then he said goodbye and put the phone away. “It’ll be a little while,” he said, “before we have to get back to London.”

Given that their time was limited, nobody chose to sour the mood with recriminations. Instead they valiantly took up the challenge of keeping Lesley entertained with anecdotes and bits of family news that had happened since she’d been gone. At some point she gave in and let them tuck a blanket round her shoulders. And much to her gratification, Peter was encouraged to dip his oar into the conversation with a little sly wit now and again. It wasn’t just the surrounding environment, she decided; he really was being unusually quiet. Exhausted, probably; and grieved, that too. She knew the feeling.

The doorbell rang at last. Peter’s gaze crossed hers on its way to meeting her father’s as he got up. “I’ll go with you,” Peter said, and her father nodded.

There was no way they were going to honor Peter’s request to send such minimal backup, even for a pathetic criminal wrapped up in a blanket in her parents’ kitchen with a mug of tea clutched in both hands. She waited, gritting her teeth, for the tromp of many boots.

But though the returning footsteps were loud, there didn’t seem to be many of them, and in fact the only person who followed her father and Peter into the room was DCI Seawoll. Lesley froze.

At his first sight of her unmasked face, she saw him recoil, but being Seawoll,  he didn’t stop coming, and by the time he bent to look her in the eyes the recoil had dissipated as if it had never been.

“Are you all right?” he asked her quietly.

She was pretty sure that wasn’t the first thing a seasoned senior officer ought to ask someone who was guilty of accessory to murder, destruction of property, and several other horrible things. Her eyes smarted but she didn’t drop her gaze.

“Yes, sir,” she whispered.

“Good,” he said. “Because you’re in a fuckload of trouble.”

They smiled painfully at one another, and Seawoll straightened slowly, suppressing a tired grunt. He accepted a cup of tea, and a seat in a chair that groaned as it took his weight; the whole room seemed to redistribute its gravity around him. Peter resumed his chair, looking, if it were possible, even more quietly gratified than before.

“Is it just you, then, sir?” Lesley nerved herself to ask.

“I left Inspector Pollock in the car,” Seawoll said, quaffing his tea. “With the driver. Per your request.” He shot Peter a sour look. “It wasn’t much to Pollock’s liking but we’re a bit short of bodies at the moment for a full complement. I can probably try his patience for another quarter of an hour.”

“And then what?” said her father, grimly.

“Then we head back to London. I’m sorry it has to be so soon.”

“Is Lesley going to need legal counsel?” her father persisted.

Peter shifted in his chair and drew a long breath. Without removing his eyes from Lesley’s father, Seawoll pointed at him. “I can smell you thinking, Grant, and I want you to stop it. Right now.”

“Yes, sir. It’s just that—”

“What did I just say?”

“Well, I’ve already  _had_ the thought, sir. You could kill two birds with one stone if you consulted Lady Tyburn.”

Lesley gave him a look— _That’s your idea?_ —which Peter ignored.

“And  _there’s_ a name to conjure with,” her father muttered.

“I don’t want Lady Tyburn anywhere near my nick,” Seawoll said.

“I’m afraid it might be too late for that,” Peter said. “But she’ll be happier if she gets to push the favor trolley—instead of being pushed in it. And you’ll want her sweet later.”

“You mean  _you’ll_ want her sweet later,” Seawoll said with narrowed eyes. “You are too politic by half. I will give your advice the consideration it is due, Detective Constable. Thank you.”

And a more backhanded way of informing someone of their promotion Lesley couldn’t imagine. But it seemed Peter had been right after all. She smiled. Peter didn’t; he cast a chastened look into his lap and avoided her gaze. If this was about guilt, she thought, she was really going to let him have it between the eyes. Possibly literally. A really focused  _impello palma_ would work. And if she timed it right, he’d have to get a new phone.

As if on cue, Seawoll’s phone chimed. He pulled it out and checked it. “Hm. Looks like I overestimated the time. I’m afraid we’re going to have to go.” He looked at Lesley. “Are you ready?”

“Yes, sir.” She shrugged away the blanket, handed off her tea, and reached to pull her jacket from the back of her chair. Everybody rose, and Lesley submitted to a series of bone-crunching, damp hugs, and in seemingly no time at all she found herself back at the threshold, flanked by Peter and Seawoll and followed by her father.

She turned around on the doorstep. “I’ll call you when I can,” she promised.

He gripped her hand silently, and then let go.

There followed in the street a very familiar police dance of logistics. “I’m sure Pollock will want to ride back with you,” Seawoll muttered to Peter as they approached the police vehicle. The DPS officer was leaning against it and glaring over his crossed arms, like the Scotland Yard version of Inspector Javert.

“Oh yes,” Peter breathed. “He’s got the mad light of debriefing in his eye.”

“Better you than me, son.”

And so it turned out. But the negotiations took at least ten minutes, during which she could see the faint outlines of her sisters’ heads in the windows, lights out behind them so they could see what was happening. After a bit Peter broke free of the negotiations vortex and came to where she waited by the car. “All right?”

She nodded. The light from the dash picked out the puffy shadows under his dark eyes. He was stubbled and bruised, and despite the change of footgear still smelled faintly of sewage; and she felt herself wavering toward him like a candle flame. She wanted to hold him, or at least to be back in battle so she could fight at his shoulder some more, anything to put off another interruption of their partnership. But the scope of her decisions was about to contract dramatically. She sighed, and made a slight motion as of resting her head against his chest, without actually doing it.

Possibly his thoughts were running along a parallel track. He said: “Look. Be really careful, okay? If you get even the slightest sense of something weird, shout for me. Or have Seawoll do it.”

“You’re still worried about that?”

“I’m not leaving anything to chance,” he said grimly. “Promise me.”

“Promise you what?” she said.

“Just…don’t do anything stupid,” and added even as she started to speak, “or let anything stupid do you.”

She felt a smile tugging at her mouth. “That’s the Folly’s version of the caution, is it?”

He grinned, which made him look even tireder. “It’s the new Peter Grant translation of  _Vincit qui se vincit_ .”

Her heart caught. “Peter….”

“I shouldn’t worry, should I,” he said. “You’ve got that bit sorted.”

She could only return him a rueful look.

He bent briefly close and breathed into her ear, “See you back at the nick.”

Peter went away to dig in the back of his car for something or other; Seawoll opened the door for her and saw her installed in the back seat. He would have followed her in directly, but Peter came back and drew him off for a short conference. Lesley couldn’t hear what they said, but she saw Peter give Seawoll an old penlight of the sort you find when you turn out a junk drawer, and then pull a disposable phone out of his pocket and hand that over too. She wasn’t just sure what that was about, but she recognized one of Peter’s anti-magic caltrop contrivances when she saw it. It was a good thing civilization hadn’t depended on Peter to invent the wheel, she thought. Otherwise, instead of railways and motorways, the world would be operating on a crazy patchwork of Rube Goldberg contraptions, probably involving quantities of ball bearings and pulley weights. People would spend their whole lives wondering why their commutes made them so angry…but no, people did that anyway, even with railways and motorways. And it wasn’t Peter who’d let Punch in, after all.

Seawoll got into the back seat with her; the car rocked gently as he pulled the door to and settled in. “You’ll be following Grant,” he told the driver.

They pulled out quietly, and in what seemed like no time at all they were back on the road, gathering speed once again. Seawoll was silent beside her, but it was not a fraught silence. Lesley closed her eyes and leaned back against the headrest. The motion of the car, the gentle wash of lights, and the low scratch of the dispatch from the front, evoked a memory of falling asleep on trips when her dad was driving. This wasn’t anything like that; she puzzled drowsily what in the emotional profile would be the same, and was a long moment realizing that the feeling was…safety.

It would have been one more devastating grace, except that just then she fell asleep.

*

After a while she was nudged sharply awake, and lifted her head with a jerk to find Seawoll frowning at her in scrutiny. “All right there, May?”

They were still moving at a steady speed. “Are we almost there?” she said rustily.

“No, not yet. Just making sure.”

She let her head fall back again, eyes closed, but briefly: she was fully awake now. “You’ve taken a fever of Peter’s paranoia,” she said.

“‘Posthumous vengeance’ were the words he used,” Seawoll said. “And I have to say it didn’t sound that paranoid to me. He’s already tried it on once, Grant tells me.”

“I’m going to be fine,” Lesley said.

Seawoll snorted. “Up to your ears in crap is what you’re going to be. I have some field experience in comparative crapology, so I get you. But you won’t mind if I take Grant’s word for it instead of yours.”

The tone of his voice was spreading into a broad floodplain of sarcasm, clearly a prologue to further commentary. Lesley waited calmly for the rest. But even so his next question took her unawares.

“So are you and him coupled up then?”

She looked at him sharply. Where was this going? “I think, sir,” she said carefully, “it doesn’t make much difference to the level of complication in the case either way.”

“So noted,” Seawoll said dryly. “And now you can answer the fucking question.”

She could only be grateful this conversation wasn’t happening across an interview table. “I don’t know the answer, sir,” she admitted.

He eyed her. “You afraid he won’t forgive you?”

Lesley sighed. It was hard to be afraid about something that was already in the rearview. Her palm still tingled with the memory of the moment Peter slapped a staff into her hand, twin to his own—and then let her walk behind him carrying it. That was a forgiveness as sharp-edged as any vengeance could be. “No,” she said. “I’m not afraid of that. It’s…more a question of whether he can be proactive when it’s called for.”

“Mm, yeah,” Seawoll said. “I wouldn’t leave  _that_ to chance if I were you.”

Why the hell was Seawoll giving her relationship advice? There had to be something going on here. “Why is this relevant, sir?” she said slowly, frowning as if she could stare through him to the strategy map he was working from.

“Because, as so often where Grant is involved, I can smell an  _arrangement_ coming,” Seawoll said. “Like a fart out of a bedroll.”

Lesley said, “What possible arrangement could there be that doesn’t involve me going inside for a long time?”

“I couldn’t tell you. But I offer two facts for your consideration. Fact number one: if our Thomas doesn’t pull through—and probably even if he does—for the foreseeable future Grant effectively  _is_ the SAU, all his civilian semi-human cronies notwithstanding.”

This wasn’t a pleasant reflection, but she couldn’t fault Seawoll’s analysis. He went on.

“Fact number two: no thanks to your evil magician friend, we’re going to be up to our fucking arses in weird shit for months on end. One man with a shovel can’t deal with it all. Or even direct traffic for it.” Also true, Lesley thought, and resisted quibbling with the word  _friend_ . “So I predict that within hours, as soon as he wakes up from the kip we all so desperately need, Peter’s going to be on his feet requisitioning all the help he can get. That’s every cop who’s ever been tainted by experience with one of his ‘cases,’ plus a motley lineup from what Thomas so picturesquely calls the ‘demi-monde.’ I do so love all this professional terminology.” Seawoll’s diction mocked Nightingale’s, not with contempt so much as resigned bitterness, but it scraped at a raw place in Lesley’s psyche all the same.

“And if he has any bloody sense, he’ll start lobbying for you to work off your sentence helping the Folly improve its clear-up rate to something in the double digits,” Seawoll finished up. “Probably before the ink is dry on your intake paperwork.”

That sounded horribly plausible. Lesley reflected morosely on the speed with which she had become familiar with the limits of Seawoll’s reach, but decided it would be too much cheek to sympathize. It turned out to be a good thing she didn’t.

“You’ll hate it,” Seawoll went on, grimly cheerful. “You’ll have a ton of work to do and no authority to do it with, and every cop you deal with will give you the back of their hand. It’ll suck a dead man’s balls, and if I could stop it, I wouldn’t. It’s a far better punishment than twiddling your thumbs in a fucking cell would ever be.”

He turned his head and skewered her with a seasoned cop’s eye. “So I’m taking this opportunity to give you a piece of simple advice. And that is to suck it up and take your medicine.”

Under Seawoll’s gaze, Lesley managed to keep her reaction controlled to a small jerk and a wincing grunt. Satisfied that he’d made his point, he settled forward again and let the silence do the rest.

She turned away to look out the window. Seawoll had just done her an enormous favor, she knew. Not only had he clarified for her what was coming—another thing one didn’t do for suspects if one could help it—but he’d also given her the key to approaching it, in a way that suited her. It was that as much as anything that kept her choked up and silent for several minutes, as their caravan sped inexorably toward the city. They were almost there.

But one thing still didn’t make sense. When she judged she could speak without her voice cracking, she said, “That’s really going to complicate things with Peter.” Because they had been so simple before.

“I expect so,” he answered.

“So why are you suggesting I couple up with him?” she said.

“I’m not suggesting it.” Seawoll snorted generously. “But there’s no accounting for taste, is there?”

She gave him a look. “You really want to make that much extra work for yourself, sir?” she said.

“Thought you said it wouldn’t make any difference one way or the other.”

“I lied,” Lesley said, losing patience, and Seawoll actually laughed.

“Please yourself then, May. I just thought you’d prefer to make an informed decision.”

“An informed decision about how I’m going to deal with my former partner turned probation-keeper?” she said sourly.

“Well, I hear you’re keen on making the tough calls and biding the consequences,” Seawoll said.

She thought he’d finished suspiciously early. Lesley let out a long breath to conceal a sigh.

Not that it fooled him any. “That’s right,” he said, his accent as broad as his comfort. “I’ll let you know when I’ve done.”

He didn’t say anything else, though, as they navigated their winding way back to the nick, so Lesley presumed he was saving it up for the interview room. Or perhaps he’d let someone else do the interviewing and just give her the occasional meaning look at all the worst moments.

Their car’s headlights zeroed in on Peter’s bumper, and the driver cut the engine. They were…home. Again.

Seawoll lurched out of the car, came round the back, and opened the door for her, turning up his hand in a graceful gesture that ought to have been sarcastic and somehow wasn’t.  _I’ll let you know when I’ve done_ . She ducked her head and obeyed.

Then it was the time for more negotiations. Peter sidled up, taking note of her chastened air and Seawoll’s clement assurance as he talked to Inspector Pollock a few meters away.

“Give you a proper bollocking, did he?” he murmured.

“He didn’t say much,” Lesley murmured back, “but it was to the point.”

Sympathy and schadenfreude warred in Peter’s face; to her relief, a smirk crept up his lips. “Oh, to have been a fly on that wall.”

“You wouldn’t have enjoyed it,” she told him.

The smirk dropped. “No, probably not.”

“How about you?”

“Oh, it won’t take but a minute to pry away the thumbscrews,” Peter said. “I’ll be fine.”

“Famous last words,” she said.

Seawoll and Pollock finished conferring; Pollock went inside, briefly revealing a bright-lit, oddly quiet corridor.

Peter frowned. “Where is everybody?” he said.

Even in the uncertain pre-dawn light Lesley could see Seawoll’s face going pink. “Where  _is_ everybody?” he repeated. “They’re all out there clearing up  _your_ bloody mess, is what. What the fuck did you think they were doing, Grant? Christ almighty.” He plowed a hand through his hair and groaned. “And the paperwork piling up like shit in a shallow latrine.”

“Double the paperwork, in some cases, I’m sure,” Peter said, with that deadpan-smirk-what-smirk look that earned him an identical glare from both Lesley and Seawoll at once. “You’ll have to ask the prisoner about the finer points of Folly-style record sanitation.”

Seawoll’s answer to this was brief and trenchant. It didn’t seem to faze Peter, whose gaze had gone inward again. Unless she was mistaken, he was just that moment hatching an idea of the arrangement Seawoll had already foreseen. He would be so proud of himself when he brought it out, too. Lesley briefly considered not bursting his bubble, but decided on balance she had better, after all: once the implications set in, Peter would hate the aftertaste at least as much as she did. And the last thing he needed was a stack of false responsibilities to set on top of the real ones.

“Right,” Peter said. “Well, I’ll be off now—”

“And just where d’you expect you’re going?” Seawoll said, and cut off Peter’s temporizing answer to add, “Thomas will keep, and you’re not getting a nap until the arresting officer has completed his duties and logged a statement. I presume the prisoner has been properly cautioned.”

“Oh, yes,” Lesley said. “Thoroughly.” Peter peeped his tongue out at her in Seawoll’s full view; he always knew exactly how much cheek he could get away with at any given moment.

The sun was coming up; the lamps were beginning to lose their intensity against the lightening sky.  Seawoll sighed deeply and reached for the door.

“Into the house, children,” he said, and shepherded them in ahead of him.

*

_ fin _


End file.
